


at last

by breakeven



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, And tired of bucky, Attempt at Humor, Clint Is a Good Bro, Demisexuality, Dom Steve Rogers, First Meetings, Fluffy Ending, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Light BDSM, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Praise Kink, Promiscuity, Recreational Drug Use, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Sub Bucky Barnes, Tattoo Artist Steve Rogers, True Love, Tumblr Prompt, Writer Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-23 00:10:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7458994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breakeven/pseuds/breakeven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky stands in the middle of the sidewalk with a travel coffee mug full of wine in shock and stares after the kid. He continues stomping until he reaches one of the very last brownstones on the street and pounds on the door, waiting for whomever owns the place to “open the fucking door!” very impatiently. Bucky’s a little sad. He can’t believe Steve called him “fuck face”; that was so goddamned rude his dick’s a little interested in it. </p><p> </p><p>(or a really messy soulmates au where steve and bucky meet doing the walk of shame)</p>
            </blockquote>





	at last

**Author's Note:**

> Well if you made it this far, I'm sorry I suck at summaries. This story is cool though trust me. It's based on a meet ugly I saw where the two characters meet while one of them is doing the walk of shame but I also wanted to write a soulmates au so this was created. Plus shrinkyclinks (i hate that) is nice and Steve really is a tattoo artist in some universe I know it. Be warned though, this got so incredibly away from me it's not even funny. Like. What is this about. Please enjoy.
> 
> P.S The tattoo parlor Steve works at is real, as well as the cheesecake place and pizza place they go to on their dates. If you're ever in Brooklyn, check those places out.
> 
> P.P.S I don't know if Trader Joe's is a thing in New York, but I'm from Chicago where it's like... the shit.

It’s not love at first sight.

When the two characters see each other for the first time, across a table at a bar with their friends, they aren’t immediately in love; they’re not even immediately in like. Instead the two of them see each other and they see personhood. She notices she slightly crooked set of his nose, the scar running through his eyebrow in a way that’s less rugged and handsome and more brutal and sort of gross. He notices a stained tooth, fingernails that are jagged and gross with ink beneath them. They don’t notice a room disappearing around them, they aren’t the only two people breathing for miles, there is no heart racing, jaw dropping, soul shuddering passion that consumes them in those first few moments. Instead, they look at each other and see all of the things you see in a _person_ when you meet them and they shake hands and greet each other like adults.

“That’s fucking boring,” Clint comments plainly, furiously clicking buttons on his PC and not looking away. There’s a pot of coffee on the desk next to him, still steaming, with a straw stuck in it. Bucky’s pretty sure he’s been streaming for something close to 16 hours.

He says, “Thanks man, I really appreciate the support.”

Clint shrugs, “I’m just saying. The whole point of writing a romance novel is to get horny housewives off and make it _romantic_ . Some gross scar on a dude’s eyebrow isn’t _romantic_.”

“Real life isn’t romantic.”

“Good thing you’re writing a book.”

Bucky scowls at the back of Clint’s stupid blonde head, “It’s not even a romance novel,” he gripes. They’ve had this discussion maybe 600 times in the past 4 months and Bucky never gets any less petulant about the fact that this _really_ isn’t a fucking romance novel. The main character, Amelia, is a young model who’s gotten fucked over by agents and photographers alike over the past few years of her career and has decided to take a break and return to her small hometown where she starts taking art classes at the local community center. It’s a really detailed narrative about self esteem and family dynamics and the fact that she just so happens to fall in love with Nick isn’t actually a huge plot point of the novel. He’s just some swim coach she meets and yeah, he takes her out to have long emotional conversations at night, but he doesn’t turn her into the person she is by the end of the book. That’s all Amelia. The love story is like, secondary as shit, and Bucky wishes everyone, including his fucking editor, would get that.

“It’s about a girl falling in love with some guy. I think that’s called a romance novel.”

“That’s not _all_ it’s about.”

“Right.”

“Yeah, right.”

Clint nods, “Okay.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Bucky mutters, annoyed. He doesn’t know why this novel has been such slow going for him. Usually by the 4 month mark he’s gotten at least 150 to 200 pages drafted and ready to be seriously edited, totally ahead of schedule, and is feeling really good about himself. His last three books have sold incredibly well and have had critical acclaim that’s pretty much unheard of for such a young, uneducated writer who was mostly totally unknown until his first published work. He hadn’t been a part of any circuits, didn’t have any real connections, and when he stepped onto the scene with his first book at the age of 20, titled rather aptly, _Rookie_ , about a teenage boy trying to break into the writing business (a very familiar topic), consumers had gone absolutely wild for it. Two years later _Light Year_ was flying off the shelves, and two years after even that triumph, Bucky released what was supposedly his greatest hit yet in the form of _Sunday_ , one of the few commercially successful queer works of fiction available about two young men who meet in a VA support group. He’s a fucking hit machine in the literary world; people study _Sunday_ in contemporary writing classes at a collegiate level and it was released four years ago. Bucky should be able to sit at his desk and shit on his keyboard to produce fictional gold.

This is not the case.

It’s been four years (and four months) since the world has gotten anything from him. With not a blog post, a particularly poetic tweet, or even a smoke signal with significant symbolic worth, it’s been mostly radio silence on the whole writing part of his life. The most writing he’d done before Pierce started breathing down his neck about contracts and money and the like was in the caption of his Instagram posts. And those were usually plagiarized song lyrics. Nothing he’s typed has been worth anything, not even looking back at, since this draft that he started in late February, and he’s desperate for it to work. He wants this novel to be his comeback, and not for the reasons that Peirce wants, not money or fame or notoriety (not people calling him the “next great American author), but for himself. To prove that he can do this, that this is actually what he was made to do, that he can pull this off without college and all of the other shit that people tell you you need to make it. He needs this so he can put this book on his shelf and be proud that his name (or at least, close enough) is stamped across the front of it. It’s just really hard to find something to be inspired by, especially since he’s trying to go a different route with his writing and narrate through a woman’s perspective. He doesn’t exactly have a feminine touch to give it; the only women he’s close enough with to ask for help are Natasha, who isn’t warm and inviting on a good day, and Rebecca, who he refuses to ask about sex because she’s definitely never had it. His life is a mess of self loathing and melodrama because of this.

“My life is a mess of self loathing and melodrama. Because of a fucking book and Becca’s lack of sexual prowess,” he sighs forlornly, and melodramatically.

Clint snorts, “Becca is _not_ lacking sexual prowess.”

Bucky squawks indignantly, “What the fuck!”

“It’s true!” Clint giggles, shooting a virtual girl in jean shorts in the head repeatedly with a click of his finger. Bucky isn’t sure how Clint somehow manages to be a real person after all these years, and watches him sip his coffee with resigned fascination.

“How do you know that?” Bucky groans, burying his face in his hands sadly. He needs to call Becca and ask her if she knows what penis tastes like but he’s very afraid of the answer. He’d hate for her to know the answer as well as he does. Clint hisses in pain.

“Fuck!” he exclaims. Bucky doesn’t look up but there’s a smattering of that glass breaking noise so he’s got a pretty good idea of what’s just happened, “Aww coffee _no_ ,” Clint whines. His fingers are still tapping at the keys of his keyboard. Bucky doesn’t even look in his direction as he retreats down the hallway.

Back in the safety of his own bedroom, Bucky flops backwards onto his bed and stares at his ceiling. He and Clint live in this totally ridiculous old brownstone in DUMBO that they could only afford because it needed serious renovation and they had lots of friends who could help. They moved in before _Rookie_ had been published so at first, all fixings had been incredibly slow going while they scrounged up the money to put into their home. Afterwords though, new floors, fixed ceilings, furniture, better light fixtures, all that shit had come in really quickly. Bucky had gotten a lot of press for being smart with his newfound wealth and investing in something like real estate but really, he’d just wanted a place that actually felt like a home. In his own bedroom, he had this spectacularly extravagant crown molding that reminded him of his Granny’s house and in times like these, he likes to stare at it and think of his mother rubbing his head before she left when he and Becca had to stay over Granny’s for a while. It makes him feel young and safe and less like he can’t do anything right.

“This fucking blows,” he says to himself. Because it does.

Bucky guesses this would all suck a little less if he knew what he was writing about. Amelia is a wonderful character, she’s witty and funny in a dull way, the kind of constant deadpan humor that really makes up a personality, but also incredibly reflective and Bucky really enjoys writing her. Her head is a wonderfully thoughtful place, with lots of room for artful run on sentences and woeful similes, which gives him a lot of room to stretch his ability. Nothing about creating her has been corny or felt stupid, which is a good sign always, but other than her he hasn’t a single clue how to build this story. He’s only about 50k words in, which is _awful_ and too slow for him, and he hasn’t even really looked back at any of it because he knows it’s not his best work. It’s probably the romance part of it, the _soulmates_ part of it, that has him thrown for a loop but it’ll all come together at the end maybe, if he gets his shit together.

The soulmates thing is something Pierce suggested. All of the Bucky’s books in the past have either been purely relational ( _Sunday_ ), or a total one man show ( _Rookie_ and _Light Year_ ), and Pierce thought bringing his affinity for those two things (great character development and realistic romance) together would be wonderful for his comeback novel and that adding the ever popular soulmates element would be a real kicker. Bucky, being his own dumb self, had agreed and signed on for a contract of two more books with his publisher, only to sit down and realize that he knew a) precious little about straight people being in love and b) knew even less about soulmates. They’re rare. People don’t actually run around finding their perfect match on the streets okay, and with 7 billion people on the earth, even if that special guy or girl did really exists it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever find them. Most people aren’t born with soul marks, and the few that are more often than not have platonic soulmates who they’ll meet in preschool and be friends with until they’re dead. If you get one later in life it’ll probably appear around puberty and it will be, undeniably, a soul mark. Teenage girls get really excited about that shit only to mostly be disillusioned when they find out that something like 72% of all marriages are between people who aren’t soul marked, let alone actual matches. Bucky has never been one for the hype, or the search considering the obvious Mark wrapping around his right bicep, and he doesn’t understand how other people can be. He can’t imagine looking for someone his entire life, searching their bodies and their minds for a sign that they’re the one and being disappointed when they weren’t even though people rarely give others the chance to be. He doesn’t even know what his soulmate’s mark from him would be. He doesn’t have dreams of the same image over and over again, he doesn’t race it with his fingers, there’s no saying that he lives by like his person must. This knowledge is ruining his book.

He sits at his laptop for maybe four hours writing, but mostly deleting what he’s typed. Sometimes he’ll have something that’s absolutely amazing, about the curve of a thin bony spine curled in on itself like protection and spun moonlight alabaster skin and then he’s describing wide palmed broad hands, rough with callouses from pens and pencils and brushes, masculine with square nails and a steel grip, and he’ll have to remove entire paragraphs. He isn’t sure why that keeps happening but it’s making this slow going go even slower. By the time he calls it a night it’s 2 in the morning, he needs a glass of whiskey, and his eyes burn like someone’s been rubbing sandpaper across his pupils.

He goes, “I fucking hate this book,” before falling into bed and asleep for the night.

*

The next morning, at like 11, Clint bursts into his bedroom to demand that they walk Lucky. The sun doesn’t stream beautifully into Bucky’s room at all, because he has expensive blackout curtains that he keeps drawn at all times, so he’s a little dazed and confused as he slides into presentable sweat pants and changes his shirt while brushing his teeth. He figures a shower is probably a little overdue, but then again he’s been doing so much day drinking that there’s likely a nice reserve of liquor in his system that’ll make him do something wild like pass the fuck out while he’s bathing and he’d rather not brain himself while that horrible unfinished draft is still in his possession to be his legacy. Natasha would probably print it and bury the fucking manuscript with him.

So he doesn’t shower, just changes briefs, sweats, shirt, and socks before putting on a pair of running shoes that he hasn’t actually used to run with since winter, grabs his keys and a coffee mug full of wine and a splash of Clint’s precious coffee, and follows his friend down their stairs.

“You okay Brenda?” Clint asks when they get onto the front porch.

Bucky squints at him, regrets not bringing sunglasses, “My name is _Bucky_ ,” he states, “James even, sometimes.”

“Brenda is a self destructive wine mom,” Clint explains, shaking his keys in the lock to make sure the lock is actually in place. Bucky, still a little lost, squints even harder.

“Brenda?” he asks for clarification.

Clint nods, satisfied with the security of their door, “Brenda.”

“Not like… April?” they walk down their front steps, Lucky trailing dopily.

“April is a good one. Maybe even Candace,” he agrees, still considering, “but I like Brenda. Brenda seems like a brunette with a big rack.”

“Neat, I’ve always thought I’d have a nice rack had I possessed breasts.”

“Of course you have.” They walk a little ways in silence to the middle of their street where all of the mailboxes are. Bucky doesn’t really know why each house doesn’t have its own box but hey, who cares about convenience. He opens this lock, having deemed himself Keeper of the Mail Key since the Great Mail Calamity of 2013, when Clint had been accused of stealing the mail of the federal agent who lived two doors down and was arrested in the middle of their living room while playing a bass fishing simulator game. The cop who’d pinned him looked up and had scrunched up his face in confusion as he took in the scene before him; Bucky in his hairy feet slippers and swimming trunks (because his underwear were in the wash), and the screen displaying Clint’s health at 0, his character having no fish whatsoever and being chased by the police. He’d said “What the fuck man, my kid plays this game. How the hell’d you manage all that?” and Clint had shrugged, sad that his lack of skills of simulated bass fishing were being noticed by people other than Bucky, and said “I don’t know man, this shit just happens,” and with that he’d been carted away. Clint doesn’t have that game or keys to their mailbox anymore. Though he still does have a big fat crush on agent Coulson.

“It’s only natural,” Bucky says finally, after retrieving their few letters and shoving them into Clint’s backpack.

“Beck has a nice set of-,”

Bucky whirls on him, his keys primed for stabbing, “If you don’t say eyes, Clinton Francis, I’m gonna gut you,” he warns, still walking and not looking where he’s going. Clint throws his head back and starts cackling immediately, so now neither of them are watching where they’re walking, and Bucky feels himself collide with a body, but doesn’t see it, as a result.

Instinctively, his grip tightens around his travel mug of coffee flavored wine and his other hand goes to try to save the person he seems to have plowed over. All he sees is a shock of blonde hair and plaid (?) before he goes tumbling to the ground, trying desperately to save his traveling mug. As he goes down he vaguely thinks that maybe his priorities are a little skewed.

Lying on the ground, sweltering hot concrete, he looks up at the sky and ponders all decisions that led him to this very moment. His tailbone aches dully, his elbow definitely has a scrape on it, and he’s sure Lucky is frightened to hell, as the dog is pacing back and forth behind Clint as if speculating what they’ll do in the event of Bucky’s severe injury.

“I’m okay dog,” he soothes, reaching up to pat at Lucky. Clint scoffs and tugs the leash away.

“Get the hell up Bucky, god damn,” he sighs. Bucky sighs too.

He asks, “Did I spill the wine coffee?” and Clint mutters something about strength under his breath. Bucky angles himself to look at the person he bumped into, who is now getting up and dusting himself off. He’s little, slight, and he’s wearing stupid Doc Martens that add about two inches of height to his incredibly lacking frame. The flash of plaid Bucky saw before falling is the oversized button up the kid’s wearing over a pair of ill fitting basketball shorts, and as he heaves himself off of the ground, he takes in the sight. His legs are thin and knobby, bruises littering the inconsiderable length of them, especially at the knees, and he’s gripping what looks like a pair of pants to his chest. Like most of what the kid’s wearing, the sunglasses perches on his perfect ski slope nose are too big and he has to use slender fingered, wide hands to push them back where they belong. Blonde hair, so bright it almost looks bleached, halos his head even though it’s cut into what Bucky feels must have been a really stylish little cut with long bangs and tapered sides before it was mussed to hell. There’s a smattering of summer freckles over his exposed collarbones. Bucky gets his feet under himself and nearly stops breathing.

It’s not love at first sight. Really it isn’t. He just wants to fuck the hell out of this kid. It’s tongue numbing lust at first sight.

“Sorry,” he gasps at Bucky, who is still very confused, “You didn’t spill any of your wine coffee though, if that helps.”

Bucky finds himself smiling, “It does,” he nods, “I’m sorry too, by the way. I wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking.”

“Seriously though my eyes were closed behind these things, I think it’s my fault.”

Clint sucks his teeth, “It’s both of your fault, actually. I was there. It was pathetic.”

Bucky stops smiling, “Thank you, Clinton,” he looks back to the angel he wants to stick his dick in, “Whoever’s fault, I don’t care. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

The Angel gives a little grin, “Nah, not me. ‘M stronger than I look.”

“I bet you are.”

Clint groans, “I think I’m gonna puke, this is fucking disgusting. Bucky if I puke you know Lucky will try to eat it again, the goddamned pizza hound. So stop flirting and let’s _go_ , or it will happen.”

Bucky stares into the distance, wondering why he can’t have anything good in his life, wondering what type of fucked up karma Clinton Barton is and goes, “I’m not flirting,” he sighs.

“You’re not?” The Angel frowns, looking down at his feet.

Bucky nearly drops the wine, “No! I mean, yes! I totally am- I’m definitely flirting with you,” he admits hurriedly. Clint rolls his eyes and shoves past him to go do what they came out to do and walk the fucking dog. Lucky looks back at him like he’s making sure Bucky really is okay before scampering off with his owner. Bucky loves that pizza dog.

“I knew it,” The Angel smirks, and sticks out one of those pretty porcelain hands for Bucky to shake. He ends up clasping the extremity in his palm and not shaking it like a man at all.

Bucky rolls his eyes good naturedly, “That’s sort of the point.”

The Angel declares, “I’m Steve,” and Bucky positively melts at the surprisingly deep timbre of his voice when it’s gone all flirty.

“Bucky.”

“Bucky?”

“It’s a nickname, don’t be a dick.”

“I hadn’t even said anything!” Steve giggles. It’s a nice, pretty, reluctant sound like Steve doesn’t do a hell of a lot of giggling and doesn’t know why he’s just done it now. Bucky’s glad for it.

“You were about to,” he mutters in fake annoyance, sipping some of his wine coffee daintily, “but that’s alright. You’re just like everyone else.”

“Oh I most certainly am not,” Steve promises, looking Bucky up and down. Bucky, who already did this to Steve, albeit a lot less conspicuously, mimics the actions anyway to keep the flirtation going. His palms are delightfully sweaty as he drinks Steve in one more time.

He realizes something, “Are you… doing the walk of shame?” he nearly screeches. Steve’s cheeks go incredibly red.

“Oh shit!” he exclaims, trying to push his way around Bucky now, “Well it was nice meeting you Bucky I just gotta get-,”

“No, no, no! It’s okay I just… I wasn’t expecting that,” he snorts. Steve scowls, still blushing. He really is an angel.

“Fuck you.”

“Really?”

Steve’s scowl deepens. He looks positively stormy. Bucky wants his cock between those lips as soon as possible and that thought is very shocking because he hasn’t thought a lot about sex in a pretty long time.

Steve rolls his eyes in real annoyance and pushes past Bucky with a great deal of force for such a tiny thing, “Have a good day fuck face,” he growls, and stomps away in his stupid too big basketball shorts and Doc Martens.

Bucky stands in the middle of the sidewalk with a travel coffee mug full of wine in shock and stares after the kid. He continues stomping until he reaches one of the very last brownstones on the street and pounds on the door, waiting for whomever owns the place to “open the _fucking_ door!” very impatiently. Bucky’s a little sad. He can’t believe Steve called him “fuck face”; that was so goddamned rude his dick’s a little interested in it.

Anyway, he thinks to himself, segueing the way writers do in their own minds to what they perceive to be the next scene in their lives. He walks to the dog park thinking to himself about how he could have maybe handles that situation better and promises, a little embarrassingly to himself, that he’ll stalk Steve later. He doesn’t explicitly think stalk, he thinks that he’ll “track The Angel down” later, which really  just means stalk and he almost can’t face Clint after that train of thought but if he doesn’t then Natasha will probably end up getting involved by default and Bucky can’t have that. So he plays fetch with Lucky and Clint doesn’t puke, even when they’re walking home and Bucky tells him that his dick got almost hard, even after having been so peacefully flaccid for the past few weeks, when Steve was pissed off at him. By the time they reach their front steps the travel mug is empty except for a last few gulps of what tastes, to Bucky’s horror, like pure coffee and he refuses to consume it. He’s got a nice pleasant buzz going and he’s riding the thrill of a pseudo sexual encounter, so he figures it’s as good a time as any to sit down in front of his laptop and get some shit going.

*

When Bucky wakes up again he’s still at his desk but it’s 7 in the evening. He hasn’t eaten all day and he can _feel_ it, as well as the harsh lines pressed into his face from having passed out at his desk. He wakes up his computer by shaking the mouse a little and scrolls through the few pages he’s managed to crank out. The novel is nearing a crescendo, and right now Nick and Amelia are taking a swim at night at the community center. They’re beneath one of those weird greenhouse thingies that makes the area muggy and a little too hot, so Amelia’s hair is sticking to her skin even before she gets into the water, but Nick is blushing with the heat and she is enamored. That much is good. He’s even grinning to himself as he skims, proud of what he managed to accomplish even though it’s a sad little compared to what he used to be able to do. He used to be able to do this and more, while sober.

After that though, the next few paragraphs are an indecipherable mess of too many run on sentences and not even naming of the person he’s supposed to be talking about. It’s all very stream of consciousness, as if he plucked every thought and movement from his very own mind and planted it on a page. There is very little punctuation throughout its entirety, and not once does Bucky mention the name of the piece of art he’s describing, only going as far as mentioning bright blue eyes and the knife point of a hip bone, but that’s not very much evidence is there? He’s been doing this for months so he reads through line after line of absolutely beautiful prose, unsure of how in the world he could have ever created these strings of words himself, and deletes them with a pang in his chest that never dulls.

Bucky tells himself, “I need a glass of wine,” and gets up and walks out of his room into the kitchen.

There, he finds a certain Natasha Romanoff. She looks at him coolly over the rim of a beer, one eyebrow quirked fashionably. The necklace she’s wearing is probably the most expensive thing in the room and they have one of those super cool futuristic coffee machines.

“Mornin’ soldier,” she drawls. Bucky nods at her, moving around the kitchen to find his favorite sports water bottle. He goes to the fridge and fishes out his jug of cheap wine, all the way in the back behind cartons of Chinese, Indian, and (creatively enough) Ethiopian takeout boxes. There are absolutely no eggs and he feels a little sad because of this. Eggs are the only things he knows how to cook.

Clint, in the living room with his foot in a bucket of ice water, calls, “Are you day drinking again?” and Natasha whirls on him.

“Again?” she says in a tone that implies she wants to hiss this angrily but is too damn cool to do so.

Bucky shrugs, “It’s evening. Everyone has a glass of wine at 7 after a long day of working.”

“Everyone with an actual job,” she quips, strutting out of the kitchen.

“The fuck happened to Clint’s foot?” he asks, changing the subject.

“Who buys a _jug_ of wine anyway?” Clint yells at him.

Natasha doesn’t even raise her voice, “Self loathing idiots who live with reckless fucks that fall off of fire escapes trying to use them as balance beams,” answering both Bucky’s question and Clint’s. Natasha has definitely got her head screwed on straight.

“People don’t have their glasses of wine out of a refillable water bottle. That’s like a liter of wine.”

“Some people have stressful days,” Bucky starts walking back towards his bedroom, the peak of his left shoulder itching like mad the way it does sometimes. He ignores the urge to give Clint and Natasha a leer on his way out and instead ignores them steadfastly.

Clint shouts, “Hey you know the kid who made you disco stick spin again?” before Bucky can get around the bend of the hallway though. Bucky is so tired of his life.

“Yeah?” he yells back.

“I friended him on Facebook!” he announces happily, “He smokes a shit ton of weed man!” he exclaims happily. Natasha snorts.

Bucky nearly trips on his way back to the living room, “What?”

“The kid? The one you knocked over? He smokes a ton of weed so I friended him on Facebook.”

“What the fuck, how?”

“Oh you know, he’s a friend of Sam’s.”

“What the fuck?”

“Yeah and he kept popping up in my “people you might know” bar and I never really cared until you bulldozed over the little shit and declared that you wanted to fuck him right back into the ground.”

“I didn’t declare that.”

Natasha sighs, “I think you’re missing the point,” she says tiredly.

“Yeah you are,” Clint agrees, “I friended him on Facebook to sell him weed which means I’ll have to see him again. You know, to sell him weed.”

“I know how drug deals work.”

Natasha rolls her eyes, “Doesn’t seem like it.”

He scowls at her, “Hush, heathen. Get your feet off of our fucking table.”

“Right so my foot’s all fucked to hell right? So I told him to come over and pick up his shit because I can’t walk.”

“Come over? Over where? Here? What the fuck Clint there’s a pile of dog hair next to our trash can and we keep condoms in an empty Folgers container.”

“It’s not empty if we keep condoms in it,” he points out.

“It’s not empty if you never use those condoms either,” Natasha points out nastily.

“Nobody I’m fucking can get pregnant,” Bucky points out, petulantly.

Clint cackles, briefly, “Nobody you’re fucking exists.”

Furiously, Bucky squirts wine into his mouth from his athletic water bottle, “I own this building,” he points out, a little drunkenly.

“Yeah and Steve’ll be inside it tomorrow at like two. So be awake and mostly sober.”

“The fuck do I have to be sober to watch him smoke a bowl for?” he mutters, turning and walking away from all that negativity, finally.

Everyone has a glass of wine after a lot of working okay.

*

The Mark on Bucky’s right arm is in Latin. He doesn’t know why the fuck or how the fuck the universe came up with that but yeah. In a permanent ring around his bicep like a tattoo are the words _UT DESINT VIRES, TAMEN EST LAUDANDA VOLUNTAS_ in small, straight type font. It isn’t a handwritten message like a lot of Marks similar to his own; people often get phrases that their half writes down a lot in their mate’s handwriting, but not Bucky. His Mark looks like a professionally done tattoo, etched perfectly, if faintly, on his skin and unable to be marred by scars, impervious by any force that isn’t dealt at the hands of his soulmate, he’s guessing. People ask him all the time what made him get the tat. It’s really pretty small and mostly invisible and not really a tattoo that a guy who looks like him would choose as his sole tattoo, and he always just says that the phrase means a lot to him. It is a pretty inspiring quote. It says _“although the power is lacking, the will in commendable”_ and Bucky figures he could have worse things forcibly tattooed on his body. He doesn’t know what kind of person his soulmate would have to be for that to be what the universe produces of their existence but hey. At least Bucky knows that they’re not a terrible person. He likes to imagine that they do sit ins and wave signs at Trump supporters and try to help people even though they’re just a person with little power themselves. That’s what the quote would mean right? Someone headstrong and opinionated and ready to fight for what matters? Bucky thinks that kind of person would be really good for him, because most of the fight in him was sucked out a really long time ago and it’d be nice to have someone else to lean on.

*

When he’s half finished with his sports water bottle of wine Bucky decides that maybe he should shower. If Steve’s going to be over at two and it’s currently midnight, he only has 14 short hours to prepare himself for their inevitable meeting. He can’t very well let his best friend, and weed man, contract a new client without making sure the dude’s safe to sell to and isn’t a murderer, or worse yet, a narc. He’d be a terrible roommate if he let that happen. So when he’s sure Natasha’s gone, he crawls out of bed and stumbles his big tipsy ass to the bathroom. He doesn’t know how exactly Natasha always knows when he and/or Clint are up to some shit they shouldn’t be, but she always disappears as mysteriously as she appears around midnight faithfully. He’s pretty sure she’s got some thing about getting enough sleep at night.

Despite his drunkenness, Bucky manages to shower without dying or having to call Clint for help. He sprawls out in his boxers, on his side he remembers so that he doesn’t choke on his own vomit. It feels good to be clean again, he’ll definitely give social norms that. Showers don’t actually suck. Bucky does though, he realizes. He wishes, vaguely, that he were tweeting all of these thoughts so that he could add a nice helpful “lmao” to the end of his death wishes and earn some much needed retweets. He secretly craves positive attention, like 98% of the global population, though he’s never had a problem admitting this to himself.

“You need to get it together dude,” he tells himself seriously. He even nods for special purposes.

So he wakes up at 11 am, again. He figures this is his new sleep schedule and he doesn’t really mind. It’s better than his former sleep schedule, which didn’t really exist and mostly consisted of him trying to figure out way to convince his loved ones that he really was getting enough sleep and no he didn’t need to be medicated. He feels pretty well rested.

In an effort to be a functional person he only takes a few sips from his leftover bottle of wine and sits at his desk scratching irritably at his shoulder, that’s still bothering him. He figures he can give it a few days before he has to call Tony and ask him to do something about the aggravation in the skin surround the home for the arm. He’d rather not have to journey into Manhattan at any given point in time, but especially not when he’s behind with his manuscript but he’s sure Pierce would understand him needing a working arm in order to sit and type for all hours of the day.

Clint knocks on his door, “You up?”

“Yes.”

“You gonna come out? Nat dropped off food.”

“What kind?”

“Breakfast kind? I don’t know.”

Bucky sighs, “I’m in.”

The breakfast is good, but Bucky’s nervous. Natasha has wonderful taste; he doesn’t usually go for chicken and waffles (because chicken is so damn heavy) but this tastes like somebody’s granny stuck her foot in it and he eats like it’s his job. He can feel Clint trying to act like he’s not watching Bucky eat, and Bucky doesn’t call him on it because he’d rather act like there’s no good reason to be watching him eat in the first place.

By the time 1:54pm rolls around James Barnes is a jumbled mess of nerves and extremely hyperverbal tendencies that are causing him to absolutely _spew_ memes by the mouthful. He thinks to himself that he’d rather be drunk about 6 times in between that minute and the second the doorbell rings and Lucky bounds, albeit lazily, over to sort of just look at the door instead of barking at it like a normal dog. He’s sitting in his loveseat nursing a coffee mug of kool aid, because it almost looks like wine, and trying to plan a route of escape in case this meeting goes to hell.

“Yeah my roommate owns the place,” Clint is saying. There’s no verbal reply but there is the rustle of clothes being taken off and before he can jump to conclusions and tense himself to fight Clint for fucking the piece of ass straight from his dreams, Bucky realizes that Steve is a complete gem and is being polite by removing his stupid jacket. Either that or he doesn’t want to smell like weed. Both are pretty good reasons.

About to vibrate out of his skin, Bucky jumps up right as the two men round the corner and sprints into the kitchen, glass of red juice sloshing all over the place, already trying to come up with an excuse.

“Apples!” he shouts blankly, “I need some of those!” he tells the air. Clint is probably trying not to facepalm.

He says, in resigned exasperation, “That’s him now. My roommate.”

Steve says, “Oh. From the other day?” probably scrunching up his face in distaste. That thought makes Bucky’s shoulder itch even more.

“Yes!” he calls in a bout of verbal diarrhea, “‘Tis I, from the other day.”

“Bucky we don’t have any fucking apples get out of there and clean this fucking juice up,” Clint snaps at him as he walks down the hall. They lock eyes as he passes and Clint just glares at him in that “you’re a mess, Barnes” way he has.

Steve says, relatably, “Uh?” and Bucky, shameful of his own odd behavior traipses back down the hall from the laundry room with a rag to clean up the juice that he did, in fact, spill in his haste to disappear from view. Clint glares the entire time and Lucky, the little genius, picks up on his rage and moves across the room to comfort him as he takes his seat on the couch. Steve sits next to him. Bucky walks around the couch to kneel in front of his loveseat and begin wiping at the mess he created.

Clint advises, “Just ignore him.”

Bucky will denying ever having _pouted_ , and says, “No don’t.”

Steve, unused to encounters like this just looks between the both of them, “Sam said you two were a little-,”

“Weird?” Clint guesses.

“Uncouth?” Bucky also guesses, at the same time.

“Uncouth?” Clint begins, indignant at the insult, “Sam scratched his back with a fork while _in public_ , how’s he gonna be policin’ how _couth_ we are?”

“Touched,” Steve interrupts, before Bucky can get a word in, “He said the two of you were _touched_.”

“Like… as kids? Because that’s both presumptuous and extremely insensitive.”

“Not like that shit for brains. Touched as in monstrously fucking odd,” Bucky rolls his eyes.

There’s a long pause where Clint can’t find it in himself to disagree and Bucky has to get up to go take the rag back down the hall to its place in the laundry room. He gives himself a moment in there to catch his breath and wax slight poetic about the fact that Steve’s knobby knees are out again, pale and bruised and downright explicit in nature. When he reemerges the silence still hasn’t been broken. So he sits back down in his love seat, with his mug of sadly not wine, and he waits. Steve looks monumentally uncomfortable but also like he’s trying to seem like he’s not uncomfortable. If Bucky were on top of his game he’d pull out _that_ smile and start flirting but he’s pretty sure Steve hates his shit and he’s always sort of scared witless. Maybe this is what a crush feels like. Bucky’s always been too practical for those.

Finally, Steve breaks it, “I came to buy some weed?”

And usually people who buy from Clint are the opposite of high strung. They come over to their place and they stay a while, so none of their nosy ass neighbors expect that Clint’s dealing drugs to pay for his last few years of med school, and they leave with their drugs like they just came over for a friendly chat and a beer with a friend. In a way, that’s sort of true anyway. Clint’s been dealing to the same group of people (and occasionally their friends) for something like 5 years. They really do buy weed from him to catch up. It’s a pretty chill laid back thing and Bucky, being the angsty literature master that he is, naturally really appreciates some human contact every once in a while even if it means having to sit near a bunch of Clint’s fake deep college buddies. Steve though, is different. What really did Bucky expect; blinding similarity to every person who’s ever walked these floor with the sole intention of using his friend? That’s not what he gets. Steve sits on the couch practically fighting the air with his posture, rigid and formal and seemingly ill at ease with the whole situation. Clint tells him about a few strains and asks if this is his first time buying for himself (to which Steve answers “Uh no?” as if it were totally obvious despite his behavior) before suggesting bongs and shit to use. It’s really awkward, sort of. Bucky doesn’t know why he sits there the entire time.

Except that he does because when they get to main course, boy is it worth it. The main course is sweet and delicious, makes Bucky absolutely ravenous for some more. Clint finally breaks out the weed and has Steve decide on which type he wants, a choice that Bucky pays close to no attention to because he knows close to nothing about marijuana, and like always he offers to smoke the first bowl of it with the person buying. Steve looks a little taken aback by this, but covers his shock by asking for a beer. Clint looks to Bucky, who’s been observing like a… like himself, and he gets up to go to the kitchen and retrieve two beers and a huge glass mug from Medieval Times full of wine for them all to enjoy. Steve even looks up to thank him. Clint packs the bowl as Steve does this amazing _bro_ trick with their bottles to open the caps and Bucky sips his wine, watching. Steve’s lips are pink and plush and they wrap around the bottle beautifully; Steve drinks with ease. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows and Bucky is almost a little turned on by this.

“Do you always smoke with your customers?” Steve asks after a beat.

Clint nods, “Pretty much.”

Bucky adds, “Most of his customers are friends.”

“So where do you get your supply?” Steve wonders. He doesn’t watch Clint take the hit. He instead, looks at Bucky.

“Uh this guy,” Clint answers smartly.

“Another friend,” Bucky shrugs.

Steve nods, asks “You smoke?” to Bucky and raises his eyebrow in a cute, challenging quirk. It reminds him instantly of the almost hardness his dick waved itself to after having been aptly called “fuck face” a few days ago. Bucky’s mouth goes dry like he’s already got the pasties.

“Yeah,” he says coolly. Natasha would be rolling her eyes if she could see him right now.

“You gonna smoke with us?”

Clint snorts, “Bucky’s already under the influence of something; he don’t like to mix his highs.”

Steve looks at him, “Are you drunk? It’s 2 in the afternoon!”

“I’m not drunk! This is my first glass of the day, shut up,” he nods his head in Clint’s direction, “He’s making fun of me.”

“Oh?”

He shrugs, cool as the inside of a freezer, as New York in November, “Yeah. He thinks I’m into you or some shit.”

Steve goes a little pink but also receives the bowl from Clint (this is the real main course right here). He takes it, lights up and takes a nice deep pull, all the while maintaining eye contact with one Bucky Barnes. And this Bucky Barnes is a writer at heart, despite trying very hard not to seem like some sappy piece of chicken shit 24/7, so he can’t possibly stop imagining being the smoke in this angel’s lungs. He can’t possibly not imagine feeling Steve’s rib cage expand with a breath as they lie together at some unspecified moment in time. He cannot, absolutely cannot, just sit there watching the sun play in the strands of Steve’s blonde, _blonde_ hair and not imagine his fingers in its place. He just can’t. Because he’s a writer and he gets paid to imagine and notice and god has he noticed Steve and _hell_ if his imagination isn’t running a little wild.

Steve lets out a breath of thick cloudiness, his face momentarily hidden by illegal activity but his voice gone low with the deed, “Well,” he drawls, all Brooklyn, “are you?”

And Bucky is himself so his eyes get a little wide but he pulls himself together real quick and snatches the bong out of Steve’s hand. Their fingers brush and the quick second is charged with something indescribable, and Bucky gets paid to describe things, “Maybe a little,” he allows, before taking his own hit.

Steve lets out an absolutely soul crushing giggle, “I might have to make fun of you too,” he laughs, delighted.

Clint sits back into the couch, “I thought Doggy could sense my distress where is he? I’m distressed.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to get high?” Steve suggests.

Bucky blows his own cloud of smoke, “Maybe he’s eating the pizza in your room,” he states and Clint is immediately up and running towards his bedroom where Lucky is most definitely devouring the pizza there.

Steve and Bucky smoke together for a few moments, barely conversing but also being quiet every once in a while to listen to Clint’s whining. It’s fun. They giggle a lot with one another and Steve seems to have forgotten about hating him, for whatever reason he was hating in the first place. Bucky’s glad. Steve’s nice and funny. His cheeks go all pink when he holds his breath for too long and at one point he starts this hacking cough that lasts for like thirty seconds and makes Bucky hesitate in handing him the bong back but Steve looks so calm and sure and _present_ like he knows that his decisions will stick to the world. The slope of his shoulders loosens into something less defensive and into this confident landscape that Bucky can’t help but trace with his eyes like he’s never seen anything better. It’s like watching the Rockies at sunset.

Eventually Clint reemerges from his bedroom and actually sells the bag of weed to Steve. They shake up like bros and Steve puts on his jacket, even though it’s summer and Bucky stands next to him and they stand next to the door.

“We should uh… we should hang out,” he says.

Steve quirks an eyebrow, “Should we?”

“Yes? I think so? Unless you still hate me?”

“Still? I never hated you.”

Bucky narrows his eyes, “You called me fuck face.”

Steve narrows his eyes back, “I thought you were trying to fuck me.”

“Okay?”

“So I was pissed that you were trying to fuck me when I _thought_ you were some nice cute stranger.”

“So you wouldn’t want to fuck me?”

Clint groans, “Oh my god!”

Steve continues as if he hadn’t heard Clint’s outburst, “I mean, theoretically sure. You’re aesth-aesth-aesthetically pleasing.”

“I agree.”

Clint groans again, “What the fuck Bucky?”

“You are too,” Bucky tells Steve.

“Please leave! Sam has his number!” Clint tells Steve.

Steve smiles up at Bucky. Because Steve is small and prickly, like the little cactus in Bucky’s window, so he has to look up, “I gotta go. Your roommate can’t stand hearing our sex noises.”

“Thanks for thinking of me!” Clint yells.

“I always think of you and sex at the same time,” Bucky replies.

Steve opens the door and walks out but he smiles over his shoulder before he goes so that’s something.

*

A week later and Bucky isn’t writing the book about Amelia and Nick anymore. He can’t even bring himself to open the document. Instead, he’s started something different, impossibly so. This thing, this new thing bursting out of him is probably inspired by his mostly clear, sober mind, and is a sprawling thing filled with impossible metaphors and incredible drama and emotion. It’s been one week but he’s a hearty 35,000 words in and once he hits 40k he’s already planning on going back and fixing a few things as the plot comes to him. The fact that Pierce is going to have his head stays in the back of his mind as he writes but he writes anyway, because this is what he’s meant to be writing. This feels right to him. A long time ago he read a quote by a famous author saying that writer's’ block isn’t a real thing and if you can’t finish something you’re working on it’s because you don’t like it. Bucky hadn’t realized how true that was until he sat down and tried to use a formula and technique to write for someone else. _Days Are_ (the working title for the Amelia and Nick tale) had been based on a very touching idea, original and sweet, but Bucky hadn’t written it in his style, he hadn’t said what he wanted to about personal autonomy and love and respect and most of all, he hadn’t been able to relate to it. Every novel he’s written in the past had touched his heart before it touched the hearts of millions all over the world and _Days Are_ just hadn’t cut it for him. There had been nothing but a hollow sense of duty in its production.

This new piece though, this is something else. This is the love at first sight, lick of flames passion. It has captured Bucky and taken him hostage; possessed him and poured him out and as his stream of consciousness has washed over his keyboard like an actual body of water. Bucky thinks that he could be proud of this one, even if one character is totally unnamed and the other is a blatant mimicking of a person he knows very well and lies to often. He thinks that this is what he missed so much about writing. He’s glad he’s sober enough to remember.

*

Bucky is in Trader Joe’s when his phone starts ringing. There’s box of Go-Gurt, wine, and Cheez-Its in his basket along with some spinach, eggs, mushrooms (for an omelette he’s been craving), and a tub of ice cream. He figures he should be taking advantage of the resources he has available to him; fresh produce, quinoa and shit, fucking veggie straws, but honestly, he’s not in the mood to try and fit in with all of the soccer moms. He’s literally requesting that the cashier ring up a pack of 6 cartons of cigarettes and glaring resolutely at Tracy the Unhappy Wife and her three awful children as they judge him for doing so when his ringtone starts screeching out of his phone, and it’s not the foreboding ringtone associated with Pierce, or the Russian rap for Natasha, or even the annoyingly bubbly “Call Me Maybe” anthem for his beloved sister, so he’s a little shook. Absolutely no one calls him but those three people, not even Clint, who barely has his phone number in the first place. So Bucky gives Tracy one last mean look and starts digging through the pockets of his jeans (real pants!) for his phone, slapping a hundred dollar bill in front of the cashier while he’s at it, to get his hands around his phone. An unknown number is flashing across the screen.

“Uh… yeah?” he answers. The sad teen in a vest at the end of the register bags his items slowly with a puzzled look on his very young face. Bucky ignores that and waits for the cashier to make his change while also being very confused about who the hell is calling him.

“Is that how you answer the phone?” Steve Rogers snarks. Bucky’s face breaks into a grin so fast that it hurts a little.

He receives his change, exclaims, “Holy shit hi!” and Tracy glares harder. Bucky grabs his shit from the sad teen and sticks his tongue out at her, hoping her kids will copy him.

“That’s much better,” Steve says agreeably.

Blushing, Bucky holds his phone tightly to his face, “You asked Sam for my number.”

“After I waited for _you_ to ask him for _mine_.”

“I didn’t know if you wanted to talk to me for real,” Bucky shrugs, “You confuse me. Make my insides feel like squids.”

“Uh okay.”

“Sorry, that was weird. I’m a writer, you know.”

Steve laughs, “Yeah I know. Sam told me,” and Bucky blushes even more and starts walking down the street at an incredible speed, “he told me a lot about you actually.”

He nearly giggles, “More about me being _uncouth_?”

“You called yourself uncouth, okay, don’t go putting words into Sam’s mouth. He’s precious.”

“Yeah a precious idiot. Anyway, what’d he say about me?”

Steve really does giggle. Bucky figures it’s okay to do so from now on, “He said that you’re a writer and that you never went to college. You’re one of his very favorite friends,” Bucky makes a happy noise of agreement at that, “but you never leave the house so you don’t see much of each other. You have a sister named Rebecca that you refuse to call Becky, for good reason, even though everyone else does. Uh… lemme think…”

“That’s a lot. Is Sam in love with me you think?”

“No.”

“So why was he gushing about me like that?” Bucky turns down his street and is actually contemplating sprinting to the house so that he can get inside and squeal faster. Clint will probably laugh for like thirty years about it.

“He wasn’t gushing.”

“So he’s volunteered this info randomly?”

Steve sounds shady, “No.”

Bucky narrows his eyes and starts fishing for his keys, “You sound shady.”

“I sound shady?” Steve snorts.

“Don’t deflect!” he demands. There’s a pause.

“Okay, okay. I _asked_ him all these things.”

“You _asked_ about me? _You_ asked about little ole me?”

“Oh shut up.”

“No seriously though, I’m flattered. Stalking is a sign of devotion.”

“Of course a writer would romanticize possibly obsessive and abusive behavior.”

“Duh.”

“So you want to get lunch with me tomorrow? I can abuse your heart in person,” he asks casually. Bucky’s head cannot take it. He breaks out into a sweat and wants to fall to pieces immediately but forces himself to stay sane. He reaches his front door and lets himself into the house and makes himself walk calmly into the kitchen before answering.

“Nice. I’m sold,” he says, breaking his boxed wine open already. This is cause for celebration. He loves getting his heart abused in person, ask anyone.

“Really? That easy?”

“That easy,” he confirms, “I love getting my heart abused in person, ask anyone.”

“I think I will.”

“Yeah me. Ask me about it. Don’t ask Sam about my heart abuse, he probably has opinions.”

“Opinions?”

“Yes capital O opinions. Probably about my psyche and love for boxed wine.”

“I think boxed wine is classy.”

“Me too. So where are we eating?”

“Wanna hit that tourist trap Junior’s Cheesecake? Their chocolate swirl cheesecakes are great. And it’s right near my work.”

“Your work?”

“Yeah. I work at Brooklyn Tattoo.”

“No shit? I didn’t see any tatts on you?”

“I have a half sleeve on one arm. I think the shirt I was wearing was… a little big. So yeah. And I have a few chest and back pieces. I used to have a tongue ring but I’m 26.”

“That’s cool. I work at my house. So what time do you want me?”

“Let’s say 2 o’clock? I have an appointment at 10 and nothing else until 4 so I should be free.”

“Okay,” Bucky agrees, pouring his wine into a bowl, “definitely. See you soon.”

“Looking forward to it,” Steve says, and hangs up awkwardly. 

Bucky takes a giant gulp of wine from the bowl and turns around to scream at the refrigerator.

*

The next day Bucky shaves. It’s sort of weird thing because he very rarely shaves his entire beard off for anything, the last time he did it and went totally bare faced was probably at the opening night of one of Natasha’s ballet productions, but the last time he went to one of those was maybe 18 months ago. Being clean shaved is very strange and Bucky almost wants to stay inside and wait until five so that there’s something covering his fucking butt chin and the little scar on his upper lip he got from riding his bike at the age of 6, but hell. He wants to see Steve. He doesn’t know what the hell possessed him to do this.

Another thing Bucky does is call Tony Stark. Tony is super rich and famous and handsome and funny and everything you could want in a person, plus extremely kind on top of all of that. They met at one of Bucky’s publishing parties like 6 years ago because Pepper had wanted to meet him so badly, and Bucky wasn’t going to say no to setting extra places at brunch for Pepper Potts and Tony Stark. What kind of idiot would? So he and Tony hit it off really quickly, both being dry sort of messy people and living for it, and since then they’ve grown really close, especially after the accident. Tony had been the one to design Bucky’s prosthetic and is the only person who he trusts enough to run diagnostics on and complain to about pain and the like. Lately, the skin around the socket of his shoulder (which is disgustingly scarred) there’s been a lot of redness and irritation, itching and general discomfort, and a problem with mobility. Tony’s probably the only man alive smart enough to figure out how to fix even one of these issues.

“Good afternoon lover, I’ve so missed our chats,” Tony greets.

“So there’s something wrong with my arm and I need your help please.”

Tony sighs, “You couldn’t play along for two seconds? You know I live for banter. It’s my life blood.”

“Maybe I’m trying to kill you. By denying you what you need to survive.”

“You just called me for help, you aren’t gonna kill a damn thing.”

“You got me there. So can I come to the tower, are you bringing the tower to me, what’s up?”

“Come by the tower after your date. A little birdy told me-,”

Bucky deadpans, “Clint.”

And Tony continues like he hadn’t heard, “That you found yourself a little blonde thing to get your blood pumping. I’m proud of you Cold Shoulder.”

“So I’ll be over around 5.”

With that squared away, Bucky gets dressed as well. It’s sort of stressful putting so much effort into his appearance when it isn’t something he’s done for a very long time. He used to be very well versed in the art of flirtation and long nights; his blood was regularly pumping. But now, having retired from the life of hair gel and late nights, Bucky doesn’t know how to do this. He’s lost the muscle memory. This isn’t really who he is anymore, but he likes Steve and Steve never knew the old Bucky. He thinks Bucky’s sort of okay the way he is. So he gets the kind of dressed up that’s acceptable for older, more mature James Barneses on casual dates in the summer and sprays some cologne before walking out of the house, feigning confidence the entire time.

The restaurant Steve chose is a touristy place. It’s crowded but the ambiance is nice, not too much of anything in a way that should please everyone. When the hostess asks him how many in his party he steps off to the side, letting a family (of guess what: tourists) step in front of him and be seated. He pulls out his phone and calls Steve.

“So I’m standing in this restaurant,” he greets when Steve answers. He can practically hear the eyeroll and the fact that he can guess that kind of reaction from this person he’s only just met warms him down to his toes, just a little.

Steve snorts, “Just get to the punchline,” he demands playfully. Bucky almost wants to blush.

“And you’re not here. I’m lonely Steve, please come save me.”

“I’m already here dumbass, I’m waiting near the window.”

And he is. He’s sitting in a booth next to a window with a white baseball cap on his head with a cat sticking its middle finger up. His phone sits on the table next to his elbow and he’s poking slowly at an appetizer and watching Bucky approach him with a knowing little smirk on his face. Bucky likes this. He likes the way Steve is sitting, sure in his skin and wretchedly together, cataclysmically thrown that way and strong for it. Steve is so little but he takes up all of the space in Bucky’s mind and he makes eye contact with him for one second before looking away, almost fearfully, as if afraid to be burnt up by this brilliance. Bucky’s palms sweat and his stomach is aching, just a little, and he fidgets with the hem of his t-shirt before throwing himself into the booth.

“Your face,” Steve announces, perplexed and his hand twitching like he may reach out and touch. Bucky wants to beg him to do it.

Instead, he just nods, “You are looking at it.”

“Without a beard?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’s that?” Steve inquires innocently, shoving a forkful of food into his mouth. Bucky vaguely, and surprisingly, wishes that it were his cock instead. He doesn’t usually think about his cock in reference to other people’s mouths and it’s disturbingly normal to do so. He almost forgets about the twinging in his left shoulder.

“Felt like a change,” he shrugs, “I haven’t been clean shaven in nearly a year.”

Steve quirks an eyebrow, “So you were really going for the troubled writer thing then? Day drinking, constant scruff, never showering?”

Bucky protests immediately, “I shower all the time.”

“Okay.”

“Uh, fuck you, I’m not seven. No one has to make me shower. I’m a grown man.”

“Oh I know,” Steve giggles, “You ready to order, Grown Man Who Showers Regularly?”

The rest of their lunch is just as fun. Steve is weirdly intense; he holds eye contact constantly, like a challenge, and he meets each one of Bucky unfamiliar feeling flirtatious quips beat for beat, nonstop, for an hour. There is no hesitation in his teasing, just a constant ongoing of smirks and barely concealed giggles. In the past Bucky has gone for the calm collected types, like Nat, who are more dry and in constant control of a situation and obviously so. Steve though, exudes control in a different way. He makes Bucky want to give up control, want to hand him the ball and next try to take it back. Plus he’s a laugher, he turns pink and instead of it seeming too desperate or filling Bucky with secondhand embarrassment, it endears him.

Steve is endearing as fuck. He snorts when he laughs too hard and has to pull out his inhaler to get the wheezing under wraps, but he does so remorselessly. While he’s eating cheesecake his eyes widen in wonder like he’s never tasted the shit before and Bucky smiles at his own plate at the excited little noises the other man lets slip out. He gushes about his tattoos, even rolling up the sleeve of his too big shirt to show them off, and talks about the meaning behind a lot of them. As he’s adjusting his clothes Bucky notices a piece on his collarbone that Steve hadn’t addressed. Bucky doesn’t get a good look at it but the lines are thick and a little jagged, like maybe they weren’t done by the professional that’s done the rest of Steve’s work.

“What’s that?” he asks, pointing, and Steve freezes.

Steve’s hand goes to cover it, “Oh. It’s my… my Mark,” he admits shyly, a sweet blush filling his face. For a second, the atmosphere in the room is almost a little romantic, something Bucky never would have guessed could happen between the two of them. His focus narrows to a small point, a Steve Rogers sized point, and he smiles softly. Not the flirty grin he’s been giving for the entirety of the date but an easy thing.

Bucky asks, “Do you believe in soul mates?”

“Well they’re a biological fact,” Steve deflects, suddenly shy. Bucky finds that he really likes this look on the other man, almost as much as he likes the sure, confident version of Steve. Seeing this side of him is relaxing because the only side of Bucky Steve has seen is the embarrassing sort of drunk version. That’s the only side that’s real, to be quite honest though, so.

“Yeah but do you _believe_? Do you think when you see them your heart with stop and you’ll know what the color green looks like only because of their eyes?”

Steve hesitates, “I mean. I believe that if I found my soul mate, it’d be life changing, yeah. They’ve probably got a face like a heart attack, y’know? I’d probably choke. But sometimes things don’t go according to plan. Sometimes your soulmate is a Trump supporter,” they both shudder at that, “sometimes they’re an addict who’s hit rock bottom, sometimes they’re your best friend. I’ve never been in love with anyone before so would I know upon seeing them that this is _it_? Possibly, but probably not. I believe in them and the whole fantasy but I don’t think it’d happen to me. I’m not the kind of person that happens to, and I really am okay with that. I’ve had healthy relationships with people I really care about, I have good sex on a regular basis. I’m happy. Would it be nice to experience something so absolute and perfect? Yeah, but that’s not meant for me, and that’s okay ,” he sighs, “Sorry for the rant.”

“No, that’s okay. I get it. I have a Mark too but I’ve never really cared. My parents have been married for like 30 years and they’re not soulmates. My father has a mark and my mom doesn’t. But they’re in love, and they’re happy. So I’ve never put a lot of value on the whole soulmate thing, I think happiness is a little more complicated than biology,” he shrugs.

“You’re a writer though. There has to be a romantic bone in your body.”

Bucky laughs, sticking a fork in his own cake thoughtfully. It’s really fucking good, “Yeah. There may be _one_.”

Steve rolls his eyes, “Seriously. You got my too-emotional-for-a-first-date rant, gimmie yours.”

“Honestly?” Steve nods, “I think soulmates are very… primal. When there weren’t 7 billion people in the world it was probably necessary for human existence for there to be someone for everyone, or we’d never have survived right? It’s baseline instinct; you love your soulmate, you protect them, fuck them, hold them, they’re _yours_ right? You have a biological claim to them, no matter what. If they were to leave you, die, whatever, they’d still be _your_ soulmate and you’d still be theirs. I think that’s romantic. That no matter what you’re tethered to this planet by someone and vice versa. I think it’s romantic that we’re allowed to give into this one primal instinct, in this world of social structure and what not. It’s beautiful.”

“So you’re one of those people who think sex is purely physical too? Because that’s a primal instinct, it can mean nothing.”

“Well I think sex feels good and I think it can make you feel good, ya get me? Like, consensual sex automatically feels good if you’re not 16 because that’s biology. But sex can also make _you_ feel good, like, you personally. So it can mean nothing and it can mean everything really. I think sex is wonderful too, even if I don’t have much of it,” Bucky states. Even though he should be a little more embarrassed about his lack of time spent getting his dick wet, he isn’t. This conversation has been a surprisingly good one; the soulmate talk is a little heavy for first date material and is the kind of discussion that has ruined friendships. But Bucky finds expressing his opinions on it to Steve to be oddly relaxing. The honesty he’s been allowed is so refreshing, and so easy. Never has he had a conversation like this so simply and articulately with someone he wants to have sex with, except for Natasha but mostly because she somehow managed to beat everything out of him with her eyes and he was usually fearful for his life.

“Why’s that?”

“Why’s what?”

“Why don’t you have a lot of sex?” Steve wonders, tilting his head to the side curiously. Bucky, being the fucking loser he is, nearly blushes. He needs some wine.

“I don’t have a lot of partners.”

Giving him an appraising look, Steve says, “I’m sure you could. Do you not want lots of partners?”

“Uh no, that’s not it,” he winces, “Well it sort of is,” Steve waves at him to continue. It’s nearly 3 o’clock.

“C’mon, tell me.”

“I don’t know. I just. Sex is wonderful, and yeah it feels great or whatever, but I don’t seek it out. And I’ve never really cared if I had sex or not. I’ve only had sex with a few people.”

“How many people have you slept with?” Steve asks.

“Like four. What about you?”

Steve winces, but he doesn’t blush, Bucky notices. He’s not embarrassed about it, “I think I’ve just hit 21,” he pauses, “does that bother you?”

Bucky shakes his head, “Does it bother you that I’m practically a virgin?”

“No. Virginity is a social construct. And I’m pretty sure most demisexual people have had a pretty limited number of sexual partners.”

“Then it doesn’t matter to me that you’re the Great Whore of Babylon.”

Steve grins, “Nice.”

The rest of the date isn’t nearly as heavy. They mostly just shoot the shit and laugh with one another, but Bucky can’t stop thinking about Steve’s Mark. It’s pretty taboo to be curious about someone else’s Mark, especially on the first date. In fact, most people would probably be totally uncomfortable with the conversation they’ve just had, but then again the reason they’re on this date in the first place is because Steve is going to regularly be buying weed from Bucky’s roommate. There already isn’t too much room for secrets in this relationship, and that makes Bucky a little giddy. Steve makes Bucky a little giddy.

Around 3:30 Steve starts making noise about getting back to work. It’s pretty annoying because at some point during the date, Bucky can’t pinpoint when, he started thinking about nothing more than how much he wants Steve to ride his cock and it’d be nice to be able to go home and act on all of those thoughts and he knows Steve would have absolutely no qualms about it. But it’s okay, Bucky understands that some adults have obligations to clients and customers and people that they don’t hate, so he walks Steve the couple of blocks back to his job and then turns and walks back to his own brownstone. He thinks about whose house Steve may have been leaving the morning they met, whose basketball shorts and t-shirt he was wearing, whose fingers had stretched his hole the night before and when he walks through the doors he’s sporting a semi.

“Dude I think I’m gonna go jerk off,” he announces to Clint upon arrival. Clint, who is engrossed in whatever's going on on his cell phone screen just snorts.

“Cool. If you put anything up your ass do not use lotion.”

“Thanks man.”

Bucky almost misses his appointment with Tony because he comes so hard to thoughts of Steve’s pretty pink lips wrapped around his cock that he immediately passes out after and can’t really be assed to move.

*

Bucky and Steve text a lot over the next few days. Steve’s personality and sense of humor both mean that he’s really blunt and unapologetic about most things and it’s really fun because that’s how most people Bucky’s kept in his life are. So he’s constantly glued to his phone, Snapchatting pictures of Lucky the Dog while they’re on walks and all of his shit, or the new type of box wine he’s gearing to buy at Trader Joe’s (though he shockingly hasn’t finished his last one off), and even just telling Steve about what he’s writing. The story he ditched _Days Are_ for is coming along nicely, and has weaved itself into this beautiful, sweeping monster of a novel about two astronauts assigned to the same mission to Mars. Bucky has always been in love with the idea of space; it’s maybe the most romantic thing he can think of and to pair it with his assignment to write something about soulmates is pretty genius, he thinks. Everything about the novel so far has been a mix of science fiction, spacecraft and gravity and the discovery or primal beings in the canyons of the planet, and desperate romance, passion, love and complete devotion, between two people who really have no right to feel the way they do when trying to survive on the barren planet they’ve been stranded on. Steve seems very interested in it, even offering to read passages Bucky isn’t sure about and offering ideas and criticism. He’s shockingly wonderful at spinning dialogue and he helps edit Bucky’s conversations into these wholistic, real parts of the story that help move the plot along and actually mean something while simultaneously being sort of hilarious and dry. He’s never had many people in his life that care to do this sort of thing, maybe Becca and Nat at most, and it’s so incredible for someone he wants to stick his dick in to want to stick their nose in his writing. It gets him thinking about the soul mark Steve was so quick to cover up. It gets him thinking, too soon, about his own and how it could be applied to Steve Rogers.

“So are you two together?” Natasha asks him, blowing smoke out of her mouth in a three perfect O shapes. She’s so good at smoke tricks that it makes Bucky both jealous and a little horny. When they were together she’d blow smoke into his mouth and then blow him sometimes.

Bucky shrugs, “Uh I dunno. He’s sort of a slut. I don’t know how he feels about commitment. Plus, it’s been all of one day.”

“Yeah, but we all know how _you_ feel about commitment. You wouldn’t let it get even to this point if you didn’t think something could come of it,” Clint points out. He gestures for Nat to pass the bowl to him as if Bucky doesn’t want to smoke too (he doesn’t, he’s savoring being sober for the time being, but it would have been nice to have been offered).

“I’ve done casual relationships,” he objects.

Natasha scoffs, “You’ve fucked two people you weren’t in love with. Both instances were disastrous.”

“Hell, one instance with a person you _were_ in love with ended in a blaze of fucking mess,” Clint points out helpfully.

“That was helpful,” Bucky pouts.

“I’m just saying. If you’re chokin’ your chicken over this guy and staying sober and _shaving_ for him and shit, you must feel something. If you feel it, he probably does too. It’s not like you to pine over nothing,” Clint shrugs.

Natasha gasps, “You’re jerking off again?” and looks over at him in surprise, “Your dick actually got hard over someone else?”

“Who would my dick get hard over if not someone else?”

“You know what I mean,” she swats at him, “You’re sexually attracted to him? Bucky that’s-,”

“This conversation is so weird.”

“-great! You gotta see him again.”

“That was the plan. I wasn’t ever doubting that.”

Clint and Natasha both look at him in confusion, “So what’s the problem?” Clint asks.

Bucky sighs, because he literally told them at the beginning of the conversation and if they weren’t so obsessed with his masturbation habits they’d totally get why he’s a little fucked up over Steve Rogers. He says, “He’s sort of a slut. I dunno how he feels about commitment.”

“Oh that’s easy!” Clint laughs, “Just ask him.”

Bucky gets up and leaves when both Natasha and Clint are giggling uncontrollably. He rolls his eyes and walks towards his bedroom forlornly, totally and utterly depressed because both of his friends are bad influences and generally shitty people who won’t help him run his own relationships. You’d think a control freak like Natasha would want in on making everything perfect in Bucky’s life but you’d be mistaken, apparently, because now all she seems to care about is inserting Clint’s cock into herself. The fact that they’re fucking is literally ruining Bucky’s life. How is he supposed to mope and need help when the two assholes he usually goes to for those things are happy screwing each other’s brains out and have no time to listen to his issues with screwing?

Bucky researches what demisexuality means and he figures that it defines him pretty well. He’s not sex repulsed or indifferent; when he has had sex it hasn’t always been for the enjoyment of someone else. He likes the way it feels, and with Nat it had been amazing to make her feel good, as well as with Brock. And though that shitstorm ended in a viable tornado of feces, he won’t pretend like it hadn’t been physically great sometimes. Having sex with Steve would be fucking great. Bucky doesn’t really participate in enough sexual activities to know exactly what his kinks are but he does masturbate and from his experience with porn, and Ms. Romanova, he’s pretty sure that he’d get off so well to Steve applying a little pressure to him. The thought of Steve pinching his nipples or wrapping those artist’s hands around his throat make Bucky’s cock twitch in his pants. But then again the thought of Steve’s smile and blush does too. He doesn’t really know if it means he’s formed that special emotional bond with Steve or what, because he’s pretty sure he’s wanted to eat the kid out since the very second he saw him, but if he really is demisexual then there’s no way he had sexual feelings about him at that moment. Then again, Bucky has had sex with strangers before. Physical stimulation feels good, like duh, and he’s been taken home by men who just figured he needed the right touch to get him going. Maybe Bucky has chronic erectile dysfunction and Steve is just so fucking sexy that it doesn’t apply in his case.

So Bucky calls Steve on Friday evening, “Do you wanna come over? Clint’s out fucking my ex,” he says.

Steve _tsks_ , “I don’t wanna be a rebound. Also, isn’t he your best friend? What a dick move.”

“She’s my best friend as well. It’s Natasha, she’s my ex and his now.”

“Oh! Really? She let _you_ get all up in that?”

“I lost my virginity to her, actually,” he admits, “So you wanna come over and find out what she’s taught me? I promise you’ll be satisfied,” he flirts. Steve fucking giggles.

“I mean, yeah I guess. I think you’re pretty hot, and I’ll fuck anyone so-,”

“Right about that. _Have_ you been fucking anyone?”

“In the last week and a half?”

“Yeah, since our date.”

“No. I haven’t… I haven’t slept with anyone since the day we met, actually.”

There’s a pregnant pause, “Why? What the fuck, doesn’t everyone in the city want to screw you?”

“Well. Yeah. But. I wanna screw _you_. And hug you and stuff. And also, you know a fair share of the people that I have sex with on a regular basis and I wouldn’t want to put anyone in an awkward position.”

“Like who?”

“Tony Stark, for one thing.”

Bucky grimaces, “I don’t want to think about the two of you fucking. It’s too hot. But I do want to think about us fucking. So come over.”

“Are you sure? Because we can just get lunch again? We don’t have to have sex. I know you probably think that’s all I want from you, but seriously I really like you. I think you’re just,” he sighs dreamily, “I think you’re amazing. Like, you’re gorgeous in every way. This is so ugly, this is so gay, oh my god, but it’s true. So don’t make yourself uncomfortable for me.”

A tension in Bucky’s chest loosens, and he lets himself smile, “How about you pick up Chinese food? And we’ll have dinner and watch Stranger Things.”

So it takes about 2 hours for Steve to clean up at the shop, go home and shower, pick up the food and get to the brownstone, but Clint is sleeping over at Nat’s for the next three days because they just had a fight and have to properly make up, so Bucky’s not worried about him coming home. He gets Netflix opened and queued up, he sweeps and washes the dishes, and ever considers cleaning out his own closet while he waits. Instead, he walks a block over to Walgreens and picks up lube and condoms and opens both, pouring a little lube out and throwing away 4 condoms, along with the Walgreen’s bag, so it seems like he’s actually had use for these things in the past 4 years. Well, he’s needed lube. But. Still. He then showers because he has to hide from his own teenage messiness someway and that seems to be in the steaming stall of the bathroom.

He’s making coffee, his wet hair curling around his ears, in plaid pajama pants, when there’s a knock on the door. He nearly jumps out of his skin and then nearly skips to answer it. In the end he barely pulls himself together long enough to unlock the deadbolt and usher Steve in. Steve who looks absolutely edible in glasses, joggers, a tank top, and these ugly ass Nike’s that add about three inches of height to his little body. His Mark is covered deftly and for some reason that makes something burn in Bucky’s stomach.

“Hey,” he says, smiling and presenting Bucky with the food in his hands, “You look comfy.”

“I am. So do you,” Bucky takes the food off of him and sets it down in piles in the kitchen. He grabs the chopsticks out of the bag and those TV dinner trays from Matilda and brings them into the room. Steve watches all of this as he slides his shoes off with a soft smile on his face that makes Bucky’s hands sweat. He knows he wants to have sex with Steve tonight, for some inexplicable reason he has to quench this thirst inside of himself, and he doesn’t want to seem too eager but he _is_ . He wants Steve so badly, he wants him close, he wants him _forever_ , he needs this kid to breathe it feels like. Everything swimming inside of him feels like a scene he described in his newest work, where the two astronauts take off their helmets for the first time in the shelter they’ve built and breathe in the oxygen together. For them it was heady, and consuming. They watched the blood vessels in each other’s eyes burst, scared for the other’s life, until they’d taken their first forgiving breaths and didn’t die instantly. The rush of trust and emotion had brought tears to their eyes, tears that had been drenched in blood, but meant the same overwhelming and thoughtless happiness that they would on earth, when one would grip their soulmate in their arms for the first time. Bucky, who is frightened for himself that the likening of his own thoughts to ones of such drama, tries to push all of this into the back of his mind and fucking concentrate on the gooddamned wonderful mushroom egg foo young Steve bought for him.

“I didn’t know what you liked so I got a little of everything,” he explains, plopping down on the sofa next to Bucky. He reaches over casually and steals the blanket off the arm of the couch and wraps it around himself before reaching for his own carton of food and chopsticks. The stand is assembled in front of him but he only sits the cup of black coffee Bucky got for him on it before curling into the tiniest, most kittenish little ball on the couch and shoveling rice into his mouth. Bucky nearly coos and cries at the sight, he’s so damn beautiful.

They make it through the first three episodes of Stranger Things without a hitch. It’s 11 o’clock by then, both of them are a little hazy with sleep and a little hungry again so they go into the kitchen and warm up food and coffee. It’s nice and simple, real domestic, the type of shit that makes Bucky’s stomach flutter.

Steve, who has been weirdly quiet, looks up at him. He’s perched on the kitchen counter carelessly, still with the blanket from the couch around his shoulder. He smiles prettily, “Can I show you something?” he asks. The timer on the coffee machine dings and he presses the button to silence it with ease, like he’s lived with this kitchen and its quirks for years like Bucky has. That makes him blush.

“Sure,” he shrugs nonchalantly. And Steve, who doesn’t know how to fake a thing and can’t really tell when other people are, just tugs down the collar of his tank top, to show the Mark on his collarbone. And Bucky, ever the cool one, gasps at the sight. It’s the wings that he’d gotten tattooed on his left bicep for his father when he was 17 years old. The reason the lines aren’t straight or pretty anymore is because they reflect _his_ own skin. When the arm was injured in the accident this is what the tattoo must have looked like before they had to amputate. It’s not like he’d gotten a good look at the mangled limb while being rushed to the hospital, not that he’d have wanted to, and it’s not like he ever really thought about the tattoo again. Losing the arm had been a lot worse than losing the homage to his father, selfishly. He hadn’t really considered that a Mark might be created out of the design. His father used to draw it all the time and as an advertising artist, had turned it into the logo for his company. Bucky thought it would be a cool gift to his dad and to himself; his first tattoo in honor of his old man. And it’s not like he never considered getting it redone somewhere else, but it’s never really felt right. To see it like this, marred and sloppy, on the pale gorgeous spread of Steve is… mind boggling, to say the least.

“Does this symbol mean anything to you?” Steve asks in a whisper. Bucky is speechless, but he nods, “Yeah? What?”

He takes a shaky breath, “It was a- I’d gotten a tattoo. For my father. On my left arm when I was a kid.”

“Really? Your old man take you to the shop to get it done?” Steve prods gently. Bucky can feel tears welling in his eyes, incredibly. Well this is absolutely not sexy and the total opposite of what he wanted this night to be. But then again, this is his life so what did he really expect.

“Yeah. Called me a trooper when it was over. He said the same thing when I woke up in the hospital missing an arm.”

“It hurt when it changed, y’know? When you- when you got into your accident. I felt it. I was sitting in Calculus and I just started _screaming_ , wailing man. Crying uncontrollably. My mom told me that you might have died, and that’s why it was all messed up and faded.”

Bucky gives a watery laugh, “Not dead.”

Steve sniffs a little, never breaking eye contact, “Thank goodness. Can I see yours?”

“Yeah,” So Bucky pulls up his right shirtsleeve and lets Steve see the words on his right bicep. He always thought it was funny that he’d ended up with a tattoo on both arms in just about the same spot, but it stopped being laughable when his left arm became something made in a factory. Anyway, he lets Steve look and even steps forward so he can touch. Steve’s jaw is slack in awe as he runs his skinny fingers over the skin. There are no ridges of ink like there would be if this were a real tattoo; the words are a part of him.

“Although the power is lacking, the will is commendable,” Steve recites, “My mom used to say that all the time to me. She grew up in Catholic school, where they gave sermons in Latin, and she says that quote reminded her of me constantly. When I was born with all my health complications; scoliosis, heart issues, asthma, terrible eye sight, she always thought of that quote. It, like, inspires her or some shit,” he scoffs, “I think it just means despite the fact that I should be dead, I’m not.”

“That’s pretty inspirational. Romantic, even.”

Steve scoffs. They’re both a little teary eyed and awkward, it’s not every day you meet your soulmate. So Bucky decides to take the initiative and scoop Steve off of the counter, and while he was expecting some kind of protest, all he gets in skinny legs wrapped around his waist and arms around his neck so the smaller man clings to him like a koala. They make their way to his bedroom and tumble into bed quietly, food and coffee totally forgotten in the kitchen. Curled around each other in the cocoon of darkness, Bucky’s hand finds Steve’s narrow hip and Steve’s fingers get tangled in the hair at the nape of his neck and they pretend they can see each other in the dark. Steve takes off his closet and sets them on the bedside table gently, and then he’s scooting even closer, slipping his legs between Bucky’s.

“Do you feel that?” he asks, “Were you feeling that? When I got here?”

Bucky’s voice is a shredded whisper, flayed apart with emotion, “Yeah. It felt like we were breathing together and crying blood,” he tells Steve. If he knew what that meant he’d be absolutely floored. As it is he just snorts and tugs playfully at Bucky’s hair.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“That I wrote a book about this moment.”

*

The next morning Clint is still gone and the light in the kitchen is still open. Normally, that would annoy the living fuck out of Bucky, but he finds he doesn’t really care. After spending the night with Steve the strange aching fire in his body has gentled into this comforting little grip around his rib cage, like it’s being protected by the fact that he has Steve, the other half of his soul. It’s a completely unexpected thing, he doesn’t really know how the hell their relationship is going to escalate from this point on, because what the fucking hell, but it’s okay because he feels pretty damn gnarly. Steve makes fried eggs and toast, sopping up his runny yolk with the bread and a look of concentration on his face, and they drink old coffee. It’s super soothing and wonderful and Bucky has almost forgotten his awakened sex drive entirely when it’s almost three in the afternoon (because they woke up at fucking noon) and they’re back on the couch watching Stranger Things. Steve is splayed out on top of him, because they can do that now, and the kid opens his goddamned mouth and probably a portal to hell with all of the fiery mess that comes out of it.

“So what do you like in bed?” he asks suddenly, even going as far as sitting up and taking the remote to pause the show. Bucky squawks indignantly at that; shit was getting real.

He whines, “What the fuck.”

Steve rolls his eyes, “Sorry sorry, I’ve just been thinking about you fucking me for days and I think it’s better that we have this conversation now and consummate our union as soon as possible,” he says with a totally straight face.

“So you’re into kinky stuff? Is that what this is about?” Bucky deadpans.

“Yes!” Steve claps excitedly, “Good guess. 10 points for Gryffindor.”

“I’m a Ravenclaw.”

“This is important to the topic of us having sex.”

“It’s important for our _union_.”

Steve fucking cackles, Bucky thrums with satisfaction at him breaking first, “Oh shit,” he giggles, “Okay tell me about your kinks.”

“I can’t with you laughing!” Bucky laughs too. Steve tries to collect himself as best as he can, fanning his face to calm his blush and throwing himself off of Bucky’s lap for good measure. He sits with his back straight and his face serious as he addresses a still giggling James Barnes.

“Okay, shut the fuck up, seriously, and tell me what you like,” he demands. It almost makes Bucky laugh harder.

“I’ve had as much a sex as a 21 year old who still plays Yugioh. I don’t really know what I like; I’ve not tried enough.”

“Fair. If I tell you what I’m into can you tell me if that compliments anything you like? We don’t have to get into anything heavy today, honestly, I just wanna see your face when you come, but it’s good to have an idea.”

“Oh so this is a Serious Discussion?”

“Yes, definitely.”

“Okay, then yeah I can do that.”

Steve nods approvingly. Just the thought of anything sexual coming out of his mouth makes Bucky’s dick a little happy. Steve begins, “Right, so I’m a dominant. You probably get that the counterpart to that is a submissive. You don’t have to fill that role for me, okay? I’ll say that first. This isn’t something absolutely necessary to our relationship. You aren’t even a particularly sexual person to begin with-,”

“I could be with you.”

Steve scowls, “-and I don’t wanna push you into anything. It’s just that I give this whole schpiel with anyone I’m going to be sleeping with for a while and seeings as we’re like. Destined, I guess that means we’re stuck fucking each other forever.”

“Damn straight.”

“And I like having all the cards on the table. So I’m a dom, and I know that when most people think BDSM they think of whips and chains and floggers, but I’m a pretty gentle dom for the most part. I like to give what my sub wants. I personally enjoy bondage, orgasm denial, hand feeding, kneeling, crawling, soft beating and face slapping, spanking, breathplay, giving praise, and my subs servicing me, boot worship to a certain extent. That sounds like a lot but it’s really not, trust me, and none of this is a deal breaker. I just. Wanted to tell you in case there’s any bleed through in vanilla sex or if you want to experiment.”

Bucky, whose cock has gotten progressively more and more interested in Steve’s candor, shakes himself out of a lust induced stupor and opens his mouth to speak, “Does breathplay only include being choked with your hands or your dick as well?”

Steve gives a startled laugh, “Both, if you’d like.”

“Oh I would,” he agrees vehemently, “I think Natasha is a domme? I dunno I liked when she called me her good boy, and sucked my cock to prove it. Sometimes I’d fuck her and she wouldn’t let me come and I _really_ liked that. I’ve never been tied up but she would tell me where to keep my hands, and I have no aversion to trying being tied up. Does boot worship mean I’d have to like, clean your Doc Martens?”

“It means I’d have you kiss my boots or feet when you kneel, if you would like that. Seriously, this is all about you.”

“Can a reward be you washing me? Nat used to shave my face as a reward.”

“Fuck yes,” Steve groans.

“When you say soft beating do you mean like… punching me? Or what?”

“I mean maybe light paddling, flogging, or caning. Nothing to break skin or bruise too bad, that’s my limit. I don’t want to cause permanent or even semi permanent damage. Same with face slapping. Maybe a few times a scene, never back handed or close fisted.”

“I could dig that. How about a leash? Could I have one of those? If this is about me being yours can that be, like, the signal that I want it?” Bucky babbles, getting more and more worked up as he speaks. It’s the middle of the afternoon and they’re sitting on the couch discussing BDSM. It feels incredibly naughty, and Bucky is so turned on he’s a little dazed. Just imagining these things is really getting him going and maybe it’s the rush of having found his soulmate or maybe it’s just Steve but goodness. He’s sure that they wouldn’t even have to fuck everyday for something like this. Sometimes he could just put on his collar and belong to Steve, sit at his feet and eat from the palm of his hand in that primal, owning way they discussed the week before. It sounds deliciously addicting and he wants it all.

“You want a leash?”

He shrugs, unsure if this was the correct answer or not, “Yeah.”

“Then you can have it.”

Sensing the end of this conversation, Bucky’s cock throbs hotly, “Okay so can we fuck now?”

Suddenly, as if a switch has been flipped, Steve’s eyes darken. A hot flush strikes through Bucky’s entire body, from the base of his spine right on up to his blushing face. Steve sees this, watches the daze settle over Bucky’s gorgeous face, and knows immediately that he’s going to be the prettiest little sub he’s ever had. He crawls into the bigger man’s lap, straddling strong thighs, and runs his hand through thick dark tresses. Bucky gasps at the contact as Steve grinds their cocks together. Bucky’s pupils are totally blown, and he’s already leaking in his pants. It’s been years, literal years, since he’s even wanted to maybe possibly get off with another person, let alone want it as much as he wants this with Steve. It’s like he’s awakened something inside of Bucky. He wants to see him come, he wants to see him blissed out and sweaty, wants to watch his chest heave with exertion; he wants everything that he can possibly have.

“Do you like that?” Steve mutters into his ear darkly. His fingers tug just slights and he bends forwards so that they’re breathing in each other’s air. Bucky’s pretty sure he could come like this, already, that simple.

He sighs dreamily, “Yes, yeah it’s so good,” he says, and Steve grinds down again. They find this dirty little rhythm together, and their breaths sync up and Steve’s small body is gyrating against Bucky’s and he feels pinned to his spot with the force of Steve’s eyes. He’s looking at him like a _possession_ , and that’s not something he knew turned him on but damn Bucky is into it man. It’s fucking hot. It’s hot enough to get lost in, to forget that they were ever supposed to get to some main event. This right here, the slick rough glide of their cocks through layers of clothing, is enough to have Bucky’s eyes rolling back in his head as he moans and whimpers at Steve’s ministrations.

“Are you going to come for me? Huh baby?” Steve husks, pressing an evil few kisses on Bucky’s jaw and neck. He sucks a mark into the very sensitive dip between his collarbones and smoothes over Bucky’s bitten red lips with his thumb, worshipful almost, but always in complete control.

Bucky whines, “Yes, yes, yes I’m so close.”

Steve grins, “Good. I want you to come. I want to see your pretty face when you let go for me; will you show me? Show me baby, show me how good it feels,” and he keeps up this constant litany of praise and encouragement that’s both so dirty and sweet at the same time that it has Bucky twitching and spilling into his briefs like a teenager. His breathing is heavy and erratic and sweat prickles at his temples but it feels so good to let go like this.

“Oh _fuck_ , Steve,” he moans, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he babbles, and Steve kisses all over his face. He kisses the apples of his cheeks, his forehead, eyelids, the tip of his nose, before finally finding his lips and planting a long, lingering kiss there and coming in his own pants. Well, they’re Bucky’s but Bucky feels a lot like Steve’s right now anyway. They sit there panting for a few moments.

Steve laughs tiredly, “I can’t believe we just dry humped on your couch.” Considering he never really got to experience this at the age of 16, his figures it’s good makeup. Bucky almost does something positively gross like giggle and blush.

Instead, he rests his forehead on Steve’s shoulder and snorts, “Would you believe that’s some of the best sex I’ve ever had?”

“Yeah. I’m great in the sack,” Steve teases. It’s quiet again before he sighs contently and says, “We have to _tell_ people soon.”

“Can we just stay inside and have sex for a while first? I promise we’ll rent out an entire bar and have a party if you want to, but I want you so bad right now.”

Steve nods. So they do. Clint is still at Natasha’s, which is a weird thought in and of itself, so for two days they have the apartment to themselves to try all of the fun kinky things they want to. Bucky will admit that he’s not nearly as into sex as Steve is, or anyone really, but he enjoys most of the things they do. For lunch on the first day he kneels at Steve’s feet while the other man sits at the table and eats fruit from his hands. The juices run down his chin and drip onto his neck and when Steve manages to steer his big dopey ass into bed he licks the dried juice off of his skin and tells him how sweet and gorgeous he is. It’s pretty fucking awesome. At one point Bucky asks Steve to masturbate for him and he sits with his back to the headboard and Steve between his legs and watches him stroke his cock. He whispers about how much he wants to choke on it and how good it would feel to have Steve’s come all over his face or chest or ass and Steve comes with a cute little yelp when Bucky tells him that he just wants to please him. On their last day of radio silence, and Steve’s last excusable day at work, they take a shower together and Bucky gets down on his knees and kisses Steve’s feet while the other man smooths the wet hair out of his face and tells him he’s perfect and everything he could have ever wished for.

Their bubble is broken Monday morning when Clint walks through the door, slamming it behind himself, and promptly announces, “It smells like dicks in here!” waking the two of them up from where they’ve passed out on the couch. Thankfully they’ve both managed to cover the aforementioned appendages, or else Clint would’ve have gotten quite the eyeful. Steve grunts and buries his face in Bucky’s chest. Bucky groans.

“Well I’ve got one, so yeah.”

“Okay but please tell me you haven’t been fucking in front of my dog,” Clint says seriously, walking into the kitchen. Bucky decides to have some couth and not comment on the slight limp he’s sporting, though he knows exactly what its cause is. Clint watches him notice and doesn’t even blush, just smirks roguishly and drinks the orange juice straight out of the carton.

“Your dog doesn’t care about me, he’s been in your room sadly eating a steady stream of organic dog food like a real dog.”

Clint shrugs, “Lucky’s a special guy. He’s got simple tastes.”

“Your dog’s kinda fat,” Steve chimes from his place practically beneath Bucky. Both he and Clint gasp indignantly.

“Dude, get your boytoy! What if Lucky heard that? You’ve probably made him all insecure about his weight now!”

“I can’t believe you would say something so insensitive Steve. Aren’t soulmates supposed to be perfect?” he mutters, shaking his head in remorse. Steve cracks up at that and so does Bucky, but Clint doesn’t.

“Soulmates?” he shouts, “ _Soulmates!_ ”

Steve chooses this moment to emerge from his safe pocket of happiness between Bucky’s pecs and the couch, much to Bucky’s disappointment, Steve’s pretty warm when he’s well fed, and pops his head up over the back of the couch. His face in tinged red, flushed with what Bucky hopes is joy. He smiles himself and nods like an eager little kid.

“Soulmates my dude,” he grins slyly. Clint comes from around the breakfast bar, Bucky notices the women’s Fendi slippers on his feet, and they hang there for a moment just grinning at each other.

Steve says, with a sunset dream of a smile painted on his face, “Soulmates.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed. Kudos and comments are welcomed. Follow me on twitter @natliabarncs


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